National reform movements are calling for undergraduate science survey course faculty to design and deliver science instruction using the principles of inquiry. This astronomy education project is iteratively developing, field-testing, and disseminating an inquiry-oriented teaching approach framed by the notions of "backwards faded-scaffolding" as an overarching theme for instruction. In this approach, students are guided through a number of scientific projects, with reduced guidance in each successive project. The reduction starts from the end of the process and works backwards, and thus the term 'backwards-faded scaffolding.'
This project is transformative in that faculty need instructional materials that focus on teaching science as inquiry while at the same time are practical to implement. The objectives of the project are to: create effective and easy-to-implement curriculum materials based on contemporary teaching methods designed to increase non-science majoring undergraduates' and pre-service teachers' abilities to participate in scientific inquiry; determine the extent to which learners' participation in inquiry using "backwards faded scaffolding" impacts their conceptual understanding of astronomy and of scientific inquiry; and widely disseminate the results and resources developed in this project to the astronomy teaching community through professional conference presentations, refereed publications, an interactive web site, and through a collaborative partnership with a publishing house. The evaluation plan is to use a single-group, multiple-measures, quasi-experimental design to explore students' enhanced content knowledge of science and inquiry.
The INTELLECTUAL MERIT of the project is to iteratively create and systematically evaluate an innovative approach to inquiry-oriented teaching in order to contribute to the research literature on undergraduate STEM education.
The BROADER IMPACTS are to provide professors with new, adaptable, and well-evaluated tools for working with undergraduate non-science majors and future teachers where large numbers of diverse students are successfully conducting meaningful and fully supported scientific investigations.
University professors teaching introductory astronomy survey courses for non-science majoring undergraduates and future teachers struggle to implement reformed-based teaching strategies that focus on students conducting authentic scientific investigations. Barriers to college faculty adopting inquiry-oriented teaching strategies are formidable and include large-class sizes, lack of classroom-ready curriculum materials, and limited professional development opportunities. This project directly responded to this professors’ needs for assistance in supporting students learning through scientific investigations by creating, field-testing, and disseminating an innovative set of curriculum materials that leverage existing Internet-accessible scientific databases. These easy-to-implement materials are based on a teaching strategy known as "backwards faded scaffolding" and provide a highly-structured learning pathway for novice science students to engage meaningfully in scientific investigations. The materials are most easily characterized as a series of mini-investigations designed to supporting student in successfully completing carefully sequenced research projects. In this highly structured approach, students are initially provided help with all aspects of scientific inquiry: (i) designing research questions; (ii) developing a procedure to pursue data; (iii) deciding on an appropriate analysis technique; (iv) creating evidence from available data; and (v) communicating and defending evidence-based conclusions. With each sequential inquiry, some of which might only require 15 minutes to complete, professors slowly provide less and less support until students do science on their own. What is unique here is not removing the students’ supportive scaffolding, but the sequence in which is it done. Because students struggle most with designing fruitful research questions, this is the last thing that students are left to do on their own. In this approach, students first learn to communicate evidence-based conclusions, then learn to create evidence from data, then complete analysis independently, then design research procedures, and only at the very end pose their own research questions. This strategy results in far less frustration on the part of students and professors and directly enhances student learning and attitudes toward astronomy. The intellectual merit of the project was based in an effort to iteratively create and systematically evaluate an innovative approach to inquiry-oriented teaching in order to contribute to the research literature on undergraduate STEM education. The broader impacts of the project were to provide professors with new, adaptable, and well-evaluated tools for working with undergraduate non-science majors and future teachers where large numbers of diverse students are successfully conducting meaningful and fully supported scientific investigations. Systematic pre- and post-assessments demonstrate that students’ knowledge and attitudes about science are enhanced when using the materials. These results are reported in several Ph.D. dissertations in the field of discipline-based science education research and at numerous professional conferences. These materials have been disseminated at nearly twenty professional development workshops for faculty and in partnership with national publishing companies. The project has an unusually large footprint already, and the materials were used by more than 5,000 undergraduates just in the last year.
